Optical protection switches are all-optical devices that enable a single client (0:1) to support line-side protection (1+1, 1:1, optical ring protection, etc.). As described herein, an optical switch (which can also be referred to as an optical protection switch, a photonic switch, a broadband optical switch, an optical power switch, etc.) is an all-optical device which performs switching based on optical power and which does not have direct access to digital information (e.g., digital Performance Monitoring (PM) data points such Bit Error Rate (BER), Loss of Frame (LOF), etc.) for control thereof. That is, an optical switch is an all-optical device using a light detector to determine a presence or loss of light on each port. Also, conventionally, the optical switch does not participate in a control plane or is not under Software Defined Networking (SDN) control. Advantageously, optical switches are used to reduce client interfaces since a vast majority of faults are on the line side such as in the optical network affecting one of the lines. In conventional deployments, an example of which is illustrated in FIG. 2, include a single client interface with two optical modems on the line side each connected to the optical switch. Concurrently, optical deployments have moved to coherent optical modems which can support variable bit rates from 100 Gb/s to 400 Gb/s and beyond. As these coherent optical modems support advanced functionality and high bit rates, their overall cost is significant. The conventional deployments with optical modems and optical switches utilize two optical modems on the line side with a single client interface on the client side. Disadvantageously, this conventional deployment is expensive, essentially requiring 2× the line side optics. It would be advantageous only to have a single optical modem on the client side which essentially can perform the same functionality. Note, optical switches utilize photodetectors or the like to detect optical power only. Client controlled switching is essentially blind—the optical modem on the client side does not know which line port is currently active.